Uploader and Approver Complaints on Low Quality Images

I have recently received complaints on some users consistently uploading low quality posts and those posters essentially being given a blank check as far as uploads due some approvers. This matter has been brought up before and is usually shut down due to the volatility of the topic, but it has been felt that for those who have problems with certain users and approvers that they've run out of means to resolve this matter discreetly and so once again have to have this brought up on the forums again with the risks that might occur. For my part I'm just going to try and keep this as just going over the general complaints and risks of the problem.

The first problem being complained about is that we have some users who readily upload low quality posts, and despite complaints on it and feedback by other users, they will continue to upload low quality posts in number. While we do somewhat have an automatic punishment for some of these users in the form of the upload limit formula, there are users who hit the 4 post floor set on the system and continue to go about their business unphased that their upload limit has been restricted. The limit formula though only impacts some users and for the ones it doesn't have influence on there is little to encourage a user to change course on their uploads. These users who aren't impacted by the limit formula should be either contributors who bypass the mod queue or those who have a lot of approved posts but are not contributors. For some contributors the lack of oversight may end up in a degradation of quality as the pressure for good quality posts is removed, but for non-contributors the pressure for good posts should still exist as those users still have to go through the mod queue that ideally should filter out poor uploads. This leads to the second problem.

The second problem that I've received complaints about is that some approvers will consistently approve poor quality images. Besides allowing poor quality images through the mod queue, this is problematic as it can reward users who consistently upload poor images and encourage them to continue to upload low quality images. It also rewards such users, if approvals are done in large enough numbers, by helping those users be less restricted by the upload limit formula, as their approvals reward them with more upload slots. Furthermore, it could potentially reward such users with promotions, particularly to contributor, due to having their deletion count be lower than it should be and their approvals higher than it should be. So in the end it can allow a user with consistently poor uploads to never have to worry about the mod queue again.

Other problems with an approver who consistently approves low quality images is potentially increased work load on other users (particularly approvers), as other users end up now having to sift through the approved posts and flag posts that shouldn't have been approved (essentially filtering the filtrate, because the first filter isn't working). A poor approver can also compound issues of users who are uploading low quality images, particularly those who bypass the mod queue, as an image can end up needing to be flagged twice. The first time around the post ends up reapproved and then has to be flagged again to override the approval, so it can make it more time consuming to remove bad posts from the system.

Long story short:

• Poor uploaders:
• Can be unphased by 4 post floor on upload limit formula
• Lack of encouragement or pressure to post quality posts on those the limit formula doesn't work on

• Poor approvers:
• Rewards poor uploaders by encouraging bad posts, negating upload limit formula, and leading to bad promotions
• Increases workload on other approvers
• Increases difficulty in deleting bad posts

I literally don't care anymore tbh.

p.s. fuck off, hemoglobin

I'm sure the easiest approach might be punish person X, but we don't necessarily have to take that approach in trying to resolve the complaints. A major part of the problem stems from the fact that what some are seeing accepted and on the site isn't want they want or expect to be here. That of course stems from in the past the view that the purpose of this site was to be a museum and we've deviated from that since then. To put it as say Orange Juice, originally we were sold as pulp free and now we're orange juice with pulp, so of course those who bought the product when it was pulp free and liked it that way would not be happy to now have pulp. To resolve their complaints we could of course try again and remove the pulp, and that could be done in different ways. The easiest as I stated earlier is punishment, but that's really just a form of trying to remove oranges that have lots of pulp from going into the filter and making sure the filter is properly extracting most of the pulp. The same thing could be accomplished by picking out the pulp that comes out of the first filter, dedicated people going through and actively flagging stuff. That of course is more work, but accomplishes the same goal of removing stuff. Essentially removing stuff from the end, instead of from the beginning.

All that of course is following that the final product of what is on the site of course should be the highest quality, ie pulp free, which of course would make other users of the site unhappy as well on where we draw the line on quality. We could easily recognize that our final product is going to have pulp and not do anything, which is of course always also a route, but that of course will maintain the complaints we're getting, though perhaps lessened by admitting that's what we are now. Alternatively though we can try and reach a middle ground approach, perhaps by offering a section that only shows images that have been more heavily filtered than the standard post section. How that extra filtering occurs, I don't know, could be done through nominating posts and being supported by other users or having more than one approver vouch for the image. Anything so long as the system would be a step above our base system. So we have different directions we can possibly try and take without necessarily going down routes that we've not wanted to take before.

Just some thoughts after thinking about this more, and hopefully perhaps reduce this from really heading in a negative direction.

While it wouldn't resolve a problem with janitors, what about lowering the floor and changing how many posts you have to have approved or deleted to go up or down in cap? Right now, it's terribly easy to be a crap uploader, and there's no real cost to it. As it currently stands, you only need 5/7ths of your posts approved to "break even", and you "profit" in terms of cap with even a 25% deletion rate. (If a massive proportion of images are approved, anyway, it's just about throwing up enough images at once that you play the odds, right?)

If the purpose of the cap going up and down is to encourage posting better quality images for fear that marginal ones will be deleted by raising the cap when you post approved images, then you should probably be keeping the ratio as something like 20 approved posts to make your cap go up 1, and 2 deleted to make your cap go down 1.

I don't know how they are going about it, but I suspect a lot of janitors are overwhelmed, and just approve things without looking too thoroughly at many of these images... The more images flood the board, the less time a janitor would have to spend on a given image if they are to cover every one, right? Raising the number of approved posts it takes to raise your posting cap might help a little in that regard.

At the same time, there might be something that demands a certain degree of tagging before there will be an approval. Considering how ridiculously thorough our tagging system is, a plain image of Hakurei Reimu on a white background can easily get 30 or so tags. (In fact, a plain white background is ALSO a tag...) You can add about a dozen tags per character after that. Requiring uploaders to sufficiently tag their posts before they get approved could hopefully slow down the uploaders a little, and require some "effort" on the part of uploaders. People might upload something if it takes 15 seconds to slap just a couple tags on it (especially when you can click to auto-copy a few basic tags) and the odds of it being approved are at all halfway decent when they would take more time to think about it if tagging an image took 5 minutes.

RE approvals, I completed the journey to contributor level within the past year, and here's what I thought:

When your upload limit is less than 20, you have a really tight budget if you like keeping some in reserve. To make matters worse, uploads can be stuck in queue for 3 days, eating into your limit. Maybe that's a great design to slow down bad uploads. Here are a bunch of mine that waited 3 days.

Now I'd like someone to tell me that either

A. These uploads are bad and should've been deleted.

B. The queue has insufficient coverage and it's up to this guy to fill the gaps (albeit with delay).

For comparison, here are my uploads that fell off the queue, and maybe I'm off in thinking that one or two of these should've made it.

Everything is biased from top to bottom. Unless the complainer is willing to use his/her time to drastically change the taste of the uploader who uploaded the picture he/she deemed "low quality", then nothing can be done about it.

zaregoto said:

Everything is biased from top to bottom. Unless the complainer is willing to use his/her time to drastically change the taste of the uploader who uploaded the picture he/she deemed "low quality", then nothing can be done about it.

If you are saying the gatekeeper of quality is every single person who registers for Danbooru's personal taste, then what is the point of having janitors at all?

Rather than uploaders, it makes more sense to talk to janitors, and make sure they're all in agreement.

That said, I can see what Miene is talking about. Most of what I upload tends to get approved within an hour or two, and what doesn't tends to get approved in the last hour or two before it would be deleted. Obviously, we're talking about people working from different ends of the queue, and if first-day janitors happen to be out to lunch when you upload, you have to hope the third-day janitors catch it. Now, maybe some of what goes those three days was seen and disapproved of, but I've had an appeal of a doujin go through where the janitor said such-and-such was fine, and it was an oversight.

Again, I think it's entirely possible some janitors are adopting an attitude that it's better to approve things on little more than the thumbnail, and letting bad images through when they feel they have to keep ahead of what's being deleted by the queue at that third-day deadline. The answer then would be either finding some way to slow the incoming number of posts down (which may not necessarily be desirable) or to up the number of janitors so that individual janitors feel they have the time to spend more time looking images over.

NWSiaCB said:

Most of what I upload tends to get approved within an hour or two, and what doesn't tends to get approved in the last hour or two before it would be deleted.

This has been my experience too.

I second NWSiaCB's experience, there is a problem with which images get approved and when some contributors are granted high status, then end up abusing that. People think Db is like other image boards and assume the image they thought was funny/nice/cool can fit in here. It takes time to have an eye that says otherwise.

If there was a way to ask about an images quality first before full upload, it might help, even if its difficult to set up. Changing the formula on uploads to stop egregious abusers from the outset is the best idea IMO. The second best is to have a maximum of 100 per day as a hard limit, for all users, so that someone won't go mad trying to upload a huge number of poorly drawn doujins. Having a stat similar to the user promotions page that only janitors can see, that says how many -1 or lower images a person has, or the number of continuous images before a deletion, or even the number of continuous deletions at once, would arm the janitors to punish the worst case members.

Bans would help. I don't know about anyone else here, but the problem might not go away till the door is slammed on a few faces.

As both a Contributor and a Janitor, I am inviting people to take a peek on what both I upload and what I approve and tell me if such and so on is rubbing on their sense of taste the wrong way.

And I am open to any complaints on my uploads and approvals right now.

z905844 said:

As both a Contributor and a Janitor, I am inviting people to take a peek on what both I upload and what I approve and tell me if such and so on is rubbing on their sense of taste the wrong way.

And I am open to any complaints on my uploads and approvals right now.

I think your uploads are fine. While a good portion of the time they're images I passed up on uploading, those are just a matter of my personal preference rather than me thinking they are of low quality.

Personally it's weird to me that the Janitor position seems to be treated as a "basically for life" sort of deal. If the userbase feels that a Janitor doesn't fit in with the ideals of the site, removing them from the position isn't a punishment, it's keeping the site healthy.
On a somewhat related note, I haven't seen many "Test Janitors" running around like I did back in my early days. Are no new Janitors being added or are we just not using that step any more? The former would be a bit disappointing for my future prospects. The latter sounds kinda shaky.

I also feel the upload limit shouldn't have a floor. If it were up to me to come up with implementation, I'd have a DMail automatically sent (once) when a user reaches 0 upload slots with a list of Mods they could contact about fixing the situation. If they were just a bit misguided and their chat reveals good intentions the Mod could temporarily add 4 to their upload limit (with an accompanying automatic neutral user record signifying it happened) in order to let them try again. If they aren't willing to put in the effort to learn and progress, they shouldn't be uploading.

Users uploading what they like (within the site rules) is fine in itself. This shouldn't be a problem under normal circumstances, because the approval system in place would naturally filter posts for the site, and the users that upload weaker artwork would themselves get filtered and shut out by the limit formula. So lower-quality posts would get uploaded as pending, but not always approved. Not anywhere near as constantly as it is now.

Janitors approving what they like (again, within the site rules) would be fine in itself, under the normal situation of every Janitor having their own preferences, which would lead to many, if not all bases generally being covered. A sole, catch-all Janitor that rubberstamps entire waves of posts with little discretion carries multiple problems. I'm going to end up repeating some of what NWF Renim said, but these are important points that bear repeating, since some people will probably gloss over the details of the thread and assume that this is simply a matter of "I don't like what [insert user here] approves."

1. The natural filtering of posts and users mentioned above that should take place with the approval process gets undermined. Users that consistently make bad posts and/or tag their uploads with the bare minimum have just enough their posts approved regardless. So they get to continue to do both for free, barring action from a Moderator or higher. This doesn't seem fair to any users that actually want to make the effort to look for quality images and tag them beyond the basic tags.

2. Subpar posts getting approved means a lot of unnecessary flags to put them back into the queue. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, since flagging rarely needed to be done at all. If posts have to be flagged constantly just to get a second opinion on an image's quality, where users are even even willing to mention the approver by name in the 'Reason' field, isn't that a sign that there's an issue with someone's judgment? Flagging should always be an option, but it shouldn't have to be used like this.

3. Quality shouldn't take a backseat to Quantity on Danbooru. From what I recall, Janitors were chosen during their evaluation periods based on how active they were and to see if they had an deeper understanding of what belonged on the site. One Janitor is still getting cited by other Janitors for lacking that understanding, so there's clearly a problem. And Hiding a post in the Mod Queue shouldn't make any approver say, "I don't think this post should be on the site, but it'll probably get approved anyway." Since these subpar posts are getting approved en masse regardless of quality, that's like saying "just upload anything, because it'll probably get approved" to the general userbase. Users should get an eye for site quality through the approval process, which should never be this relaxed. If they want to just upload anything without being held to this site's standards, they're free to go over to Gelbooru.

To summarize, poor uploaders could be less of an issue and filtered out by the system already in place, if it wasn't for a problem approver that allows their posts and enables these weaker users to begin with. Going after the basic users that "literally don't care anymore" isn't going to stop a higher level approver with more influence that screws with the system by mindlessly allowing these posts in the first place.

This has been brought up before by longtime users in records, comments, flags, and forum posts. To paraphrase buehbueh, the door does needs to be slammed on some faces. Or, this will just keep happening over and over again with more of the above.

Posting something below 10+ points level of fap material and then waiting 3 days for approval is a grim standard here and usually suicidal for your ratio, unless:
1. you hit the sweet spot of some of mods who also luckily happens to check the queue
2. its copyright has well established large fanbase (preferably - though not limited to - kancolle or good old touhou)
And after these 3 days finally comes guess-who? to approve it. If you're lucky enough.
On the other hand such and much worse posts happen to be posted by contrib+ and nobody cares about it.

So no, it's not the problem with low quality images approval - because all such approvers are doing is in fact only equalizing the general level of arts already and widely accepted here.

I began writing what can and should be done if you want to change it, but then I remembered that the one person who could really change something is not reading the forums anyway so if you excuse me I'll stop wasting my time here.

OOZ662 said:

On a somewhat related note, I haven't seen many "Test Janitors" running around like I did back in my early days. Are no new Janitors being added or are we just not using that step any more? The former would be a bit disappointing for my future prospects. The latter sounds kinda shaky.

Janitor trials still exist, but haven't been used since late 2013 by the looks of it.

richie said:

So no, it's not the problem with low quality images approval - because all such approvers are doing is in fact only equalizing the general level of arts already and widely accepted here.

Therein lies the problem. Forcing the standard down to begin with doesn't later justify maintaining it at that lower level.

So this is essentially a "who moderates the moderators" issue, right? There's not much to discuss here if Albert doesn't see this as a problem, especially now that jxh has stepped down.

Well, I was trying to talk about things beyond the specific janitors.

In the case of a person getting enough deleted posts that they are at or near the upload cap floor, and having 10 negative feedbacks even with lax 'janitoring', then it's not entirely a problem of the janitors, as it's more a problem of the uploader not feeling any sort of pressure to "literally don't care anymore" about the feedback. At that point, there really isn't anything to do but start talking about upload lockouts or bans. A janitor that allows their posts through is a separate issue entirely.

At the same time, I also feel that the cap tends to become meaningless after you've uploaded some odd number of posts. I mean, especially when I take the time to tag posts, it's hard to find a situation where I can be uploading over 50 images in a row before someone is probably already approving what I started uploading. (Again, thanks to a majority of uploads being approved within the first couple hours...)

Hence, again, I think the tagging requirements could be a little more stringent (to slow down the upload rate a little, and also, to keep other users from having to run in to fix your tags for you while you're out there uploading more stuff...) and you could make the number of posts that need approval per increase in upload cap higher, which would help slow down the point at which people hit the place where there might as well be no cap at all.

NWSiaCB said:

Well, I was trying to talk about things beyond the specific janitors.

In the case of a person getting enough deleted posts that they are at or near the upload cap floor, and having 10 negative feedbacks even with lax 'janitoring', then it's not entirely a problem of the janitors, as it's more a problem of the uploader not feeling any sort of pressure to "literally don't care anymore" about the feedback. At that point, there really isn't anything to do but start talking about upload lockouts or bans. A janitor that allows their posts through is a separate issue entirely.

I see what you're getting at here, and you're right that a trouble user like that needs action taken against them at this point. It's certainly been justified with enough warnings from other users. But this is only because the current system that would have dealt with them before without much intervention is getting unknowingly circumvented by someone higher with enough influence.

For that reason, I still don't see these as fully separate issues and are both part of the same problem. One is still allowing the other to take place, and it will keep happening with other problem users unless action is taken there as well.

OOZ662 said:

Therein lies the problem. Forcing the standard down to begin with doesn't later justify maintaining it at that lower level.

Also, this. People see a problem with the quality of posts that are being approved; trying to justify that after the fact as "expanding the scope of the site's accepted artwork" or something like that is not a solution.

Apollyon said:
Also, this. People see a problem with the quality of posts that are being approved; trying to justify that after the fact as "expanding the scope of the site's accepted artwork" or something like that is not a solution.

It's not a justification, it's stating a fact. Now, the other question is if such result was intended or not.
If - supposedly - not then my point is the current system simply doesn't work.
Promotions to contrib+ are de facto for life. I think I can count with my one hand situations when someone was demoted (not counting test janitors) and it always was a big ruckus with that.
Well, no surprise here because it's an ugly job and in fact there is no good, possibly objective feedback for posters who are priviledged by avoiding the queue.
Hence the gap between simple users and contrib+ which is huge: from being subjected by often capricious tastes of mod team to almost unrestricted freedom.
Janitors+ are not being motivated for doing the queue chores.
Neither penalized for regular omitting it.
We don't have an admin.
And so on...

You won't change it by pointing fingers on a case by case basis.